DPLA Plenary Session – Afternoon

The afternoon started with beta-sprint presentations showing off system proof-of-concept applications. CLIR showed a system that aggregated data from publicly supported research projects from IMLS. The beta sprint projects are located at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/dpla/ and show off ways of aggregating and sharing metadata, discovery systems and new approaches to indexing. There are some live links to these sites at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/dpla/Beta_Sprint.

There was an interesting theme throughout the day about the relative value and sustainability of interfaces vs aggregated and curated data. The first few sprint projects certainly sought to bridge this divide. The third presentation (extraMUROS) showed off a system designed around HTML5 and Zeega which is tuned for creating interactive documentaries. I got the sense that design of this system focused as much on discovery, creation, recreation, publishing and curation as much as it focused on data aggregation. EXTRAmuros showed off a re-visualized collection of american landscape and architecture. The views included images, categories, user-added collections.

The presentation that allowed was by John Butler and Wendy Lougee and focused on bringing together and enhancing access to government publications suing linked open data and crowd sourcing. Their beta-sprint video is at http://z.umn.edu/dplaumn. The folks from the National Technical University of Athens MINT Group talked about a metadata schema mapping system that has seen widespread adoption in Europe (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jR3HMAanmzM).

David Weinberger talked about library cloud, a metadata server service that aggregates library metadata and re-publishes it as open data. It includes resource metadata, circulation met data, and metadata about digital objects. The site is instantiate using a second project called shelf life which shows how this aggregated metadata can be used as a discovery system for aggregated resources with lots of embedded metadata, social interaction and external resources.

Following the sprint section we heard from lightning round presentations – bookworm Alpha, a ‘LinkedIn’ profile for libraries idea, and WikiCite – a wiki for crowd sourcing and discussing citations in context.